Master of realism

I WILL begin by taking my (metaphorical) hat off to Tom Wolfe. Here is a writer who reinvented journalism, here is a man who made abstruse or dead subjects (not the same thing I know but often interchangeable) come alive and here is someone who is as relevant today as he was 30 years ago, which is saying something. His new book, Hooking Up (Cape) a collection of essays and a novella, Ambush at Fort Bragg, only served to reconfirm my admiration.

The best pieces in the book, from my point of view, naturally had to do with all the literary skirmishing Wolfe has been involved in for decades. The one which gripped me the most was a piece called "The Three Stooges" which goes after three of America's most celebrated writers, Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving. In this case, Wolfe (who is known for his literary dogfights) was not the aggressor.

When his huge novel, A Man in Full, which took 11 years to write, first came out it was celebrated all over the United States, and sold a ton of copies. Time magazine put the author on its cover, and he was the darling of all the talk shows. The three people who hated the book (or its author, it was hard to tell which) were Mailer, Updike and Irving. Never one to back down from a fight, Wolfe fought back, and this article was the result. It is full of great stuff.

Here, for example, is Wolfe ticking off John Irving : "What on earth prompted John Irving to spend more than four years writing a 633-page novel set in India, A Son of the Circus, and publish it (1994) with a preface that said: 'This isn't a novel about India. I don't know India. I was only there once, for less than a month. When I was there, I was struck by the country's foreignness; it remains obdurately foreign to me?' I don't know India. It was true - which only makes it odder. A Son of the Circus, all 633 pages of it, is not a novel about India or any other place in this world. It sank without a trace. "

But the reason this essay is marvellous is not because of the literary jousting, engrossing though it is but because, in it, Wolfe makes an impassioned plea for writers to get real. That is to say, he says novelists should get out of their cork lined studies, and pale bloodless themes, and fully engage with the vibrant, restless, beautiful, loathsome, dangerous, exciting subject on their very doorstep - the world they live in. It is something writers here could take to heart. And it makes for successful novels. Think only of Seth, Roy, Ghosh, Mistry, Chandra ... and what Wolfe advocates immediately becomes apparent. These writers have gone out and caught the very real world on the page - and it is this readers want, not pallid intellectual exercises.

There are other essays in the book that should appeal to the literary minded reader - such as the two attacks that Wolfe launched nearly 35 years on the then eminence grise of American magazine editors - the legendary William Shawn of the New Yorker.

Amazingly (and this is quite a testimonial to Wolfe's full- blooded, descriptive style), the pieces have not dated and are still as interesting as they once were. The novella is not nearly as interesting as the non-fiction pieces, but it is worth skimming through.

The final piece I would like to mention is the one which opens the book, where the author gives us his take on the U.S. in the 20th Century. It is full of page after page of hilarious fulmination, much of it centering on sex.

Here is one of his observations: "'Hooking up' was a term known in the year 2000 to almost every American child over the age of nine, but to only a relatively small percentage of their parents, who, even if they heard it, thought it was being used in the old sense of 'meeting' someone. Among the children, hooking up was always a sexual experience, but the nature and extent of what they did could vary widely. Back in the 20th Century, American girls had used baseball terminology. 'First base' referred to embracing and kissing; 'second base' referred to groping and fondling and deep, or 'French', kissing, commonly known as 'heavy petting' ; 'third base' referred to fellatio, usually known in polite conversation by the ambiguous term 'oral sex'; and 'home plate' meant conception-mode intercourse, known familiarly as 'going all the way'. In the year 2000, in the era of hooking up, 'first base' meant deep kissing ('tonsil hockey'), groping and fondling; 'second base' meant oral sex; 'third base' meant going all the way; and 'home plate' meant learning each other's names."

I had a good time with Hooking Up. I'm sure you will too.

DAVID DAVIDAR

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